For my birthday, my kind old mother gave me the hardback book of Young Avengers: Sidekicks (collecting the first 6 issues of the series) and I recently finished reading it. I gotta tell ya, I really enjoyed this book! In the aftermath of the Avengers being disbanded (and The Vision getting ripped in half by She Hulk), these young heroes step up to fill the void, but they aren’t exactly what they appear to be…
The storyline is fun ,the dialogue is awesome (“Where’s my superhero handbook? Oh, right, I left it in my other tights”), and the characters are interesting. My only complaint are the names. While “Patriot” is fitting for the Junior Captain America, I’m not very fond of “Iron Lad” or “Hulkling” (probably because it makes me thing these guys should belong to the Legion of Super Heroes and the Teen Titans (Marvel rules and DC drools!)
“Asgardian” was an okay name, then they went and changed it to “Wiccan” after it was revealed that this kid had no connection to the Norse Gods whatsoever and was only a novice magic user. And “Hulkling” isn’t even Gamma radiated, but is actually a shape shifter (again, very similar to another green teenage superhero who bore a name ending in “ling.”)
Whatever this book lacked in originality, it made up for in plot, character development and fantastic artwork. I would recommend it to any Avenger fan and it’s well worth the $20 price tag.

As for game news, I wasn’t able to play with the fellas on Friday night. The wife took the night off from work and I decided to spend some time with her and the chillun’s. I guess my absence sort of altered the original plans of continuing the Marvel RPG campaign, since they played video games instead. Sorry guys, you could have gone on without me – I really wouldn’t have minded! We’ll have to see what sort of craziness we can involve ourselves in this Friday…